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NOTE Immanuel Kant and G.W.F. Hegel

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I'm going to talk today, this morning, about two people, Kant and Hegel.

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Kant was the person that I think Ayn Rand is called the most evil person who ever existed.

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I think a friend of mine told me she also referred to him once as the machine gunner of the mind.

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I don't think, at least in his political philosophy, he should be treated in this way, actually had some ideas at any rate that were quite compatible with classical liberalism, although there are others that are somewhat more questionable.

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Kant lived from 1720 to 1804. He had a very uneventful life. He spent his entire adult life in the city of Königsberg in East Prussia.

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I think he once visited a neighboring city for a short time, but that was the extent of his travels.

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He did have, though, from his reading, a detailed knowledge of all the cities in Europe, and he would have at his house a dinner party every night, and he would have conversations on all sorts of things with people who attended.

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He was famous for his very regular habits. He believed in having rules for everything. Annette Beier has a very funny essay on Kant, where she points out that he thought there was some special method of walking that was more healthy, where you would raise your feet off the ground when you walked, and he was very careful to do that whenever he walked.

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I mentioned throughout the series of lectures, I referred to Straussian interpretations, where the Straussians contend there is a secret or hidden meaning in the text.

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And the philosophers write in a very careful way to conceal their true message.

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Now, Kant actually had one statement in which he admits himself that he wrote in this way.

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This is sort of not, he's admitting that he was very careful.

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The episode was this, Kant's views on religion were quite unorthodox, although he believed

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He didn't God, at least he said he did, and he had arguments for the existence of God.

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He didn't accept the orthodox Lutheran teachings of the Prussian state.

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So under the Prussian King Frederick William II, the Minister of Education was a man called

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Boehm, he had the king send Kant an order not to write anything on the subject of religion.

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Kant's views were too controversial. So, Kant replied, as your majesty's faithful servant,

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I will, of course, obey and not write anything. But when Frederick William II died, he was

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replaced by Frederick William III, Kant felt free to write about religion, and he did.

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He can't point out the reason he wasn't bound, he felt he wasn't bound by his promise not to write about religion,

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was he'd said, as your majesty's faithful servant.

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So he felt he worded it in a very tricky way that this meant the promise was made just to that king, so he wasn't bound anymore by it.

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So, this is an example of one case where there is very careful writing.

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Just in passing, as I mentioned Straussian, the Straussian interpretation of Kant is,

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of course, that he's basically a Hobbesian, and also the Kantians believe that the metaphysics

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Metaphysics and Epistemology really is just window dressing, what he was really interested

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in was political philosophy, the other stuff is just a bit added extra.

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Now in political philosophy there are two main works that I'll be considering, the first

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The first one is the first part, part one of the metaphysics and morals and also a short book that Kant wrote called Perpetual Peace.

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But before I go into that, I want to say a little bit about Kant's ethical theory because we need to understand this in order to understand the political philosophy.

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In ethical statements, there's a statement saying we ought to do something, we ought to respect other people's rights, we ought not to steal.

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And any statement ought something telling us what to do, an imperative.

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We can distinguish two different kinds of imperatives.

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Hypothetical imperatives and categorical imperatives.

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A hypothetical imperative is one that says,

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if you want such and such, if you have a certain goal, you should do this.

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If you want to be healthy, you should eat nutritious food and exercise.

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That isn't saying you should unconditionally eat nutritious food and exercise.

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If you want that goal, then you should do this.

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This kind of, this is accepted by everybody thinks this is quite, there's nothing strange about this.

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Everybody accepts this is a valid way of looking at imperatives. They're all, an imperative is how you achieve a goal.

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Goal. Now, within this hypothetical imperative, there is a special class, which is called

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an ascertoric imperative. Remember, hypothetical imperative is, if you want this, you should

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If you want such and such, you should do this. Now supposing, in fact, everybody does want something, then you have an esoteric imperative.

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It's hypothetical because it still states a goal. It's if you want this, then here's what to do.

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do but everybody does want it so you can in effect drop out the if part of the

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sentence because everybody does want it and Kant thought that there was such an

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ascetoric imperative that obtains namely he thought everybody wants his or her

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own happiness this is a psychological law we're all aimed at our own happiness

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So if you have an imperative that if you want to be happy, if you want a happy life, you

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should do such and such, if that's correct, if those things are in fact needed to lead

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a happy life, then everybody would have reason to do them.

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So that is the hypothetical imperative.

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Now, the controversial type of imperative is the second class, the categorical imperative.

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Now, this is an imperative that just says, do such and such, or you ought to do this.

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There is no goal stated.

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It's not in order to achieve this, you ought to do that.

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It's do this.

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So Kant thought that he could show by reason that there are such categorical imperatives.

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There is a categorical imperative of different versions, but now there was a famous article

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that came out published in the Philosophical Review in 1972 by Philippa Foote, a famous

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British philosopher, who was also the granddaughter of Grover Cleveland, called morality as a

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system of hypothetical imperatives, and she argued that the notion of a categorical imperative

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in concept really doesn't make sense.

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We can certainly have statements of the form do such and such.

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Suppose I say, in chess you can't move, if your king is in check you have to move it.

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So I say, you must move your king if it's in check.

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Well, that isn't, I've told you something you must do, but you have no reason to accept

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what I'm saying unless you're playing chess or you want to follow the rules of chess.

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So her point was, we can certainly state categorical imperative, we can state, we can make imperatives

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without giving any hypothetical that starts them off, any if-clause saying why you should

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do that.

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But unless there's one that's presumed, then no one has a reason to do it.

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You would just have a statement, I'm saying, while I say, everyone take out your wallet

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and give me all your money.

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I hope everybody does that but you have no reason to do it. I mean just so her argument

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was just that because you've stated a categorical statement that doesn't, it kind of hasn't

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shown that anyone has any reason to follow any categorical statement that she thought

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only hypothetical imperatives give someone a reason to do something.

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I think to see though what Kant had in mind, I think we could start off by a simpler example

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of one he used.

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I'm supposing we say you shouldn't have contradictory goals.

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Contradictory goals mean ones that can't be realized at the same time.

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Like I say, suppose I say you can't both want to diet and eat whatever you want at the same time.

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So I think one could argue this is just a demand of reason.

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It isn't that there's no hypothetical involved.

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about just a demand of reason that we not have desires of this contradictory kind.

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And what Kant was doing when he talked about categorical comparatives, he thought you could

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get more out of reason than that, just avoiding contradictory demands.

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He thought there was, that you could, he thought reason had, we could learn more from reason

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than just this example.

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For example, the famous first version of the categorical comparative, you take the maxim of your action, that's to say, maxim is a description of what you're doing, stating what you intend in doing that action.

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If you couldn't will that everyone do this action, then you would be violating reasoning.

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For example, he gives this example when people have disputed whether it would lead to a contradiction

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of the kind he said.

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He said, supposing I promise, say, to give somebody some money, I mean, in an emergency,

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I borrow some money from someone in an emergency, and I promise to give it back to him, and

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I intend that, I don't intend actually to give it back to him.

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So Kant said, well, could I will that everyone follow that maxim, and he said no, because

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then if everybody did that, people would knew about this and no one would ever believe such

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such a promise, so the institution of promising, at least promises of that kind, would break

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down, so I would be contradicting myself if I made a promise of that kind.

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There are all sorts of complications in what the different kinds of contradictions are,

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but this is the basic idea, so Kant thought we could get, just by reason, we could get

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categorical demands on what we should do, so our demands are not just limited to hypothetical.

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I want to just, before I turn from Kant's ethics to go into the political philosophy,

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I just want to add sort of a speculative idea. If Kant is right on what he says about the

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and the Asiaturic Imperative.

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Everybody wants to achieve his or her own happiness.

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Now supposing one finds plausible

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an Aristotelian account of how you achieve your happiness,

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then you could take the Categorical Imperative

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as just saying if this Aristotelian program

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is universalizable, and you could take, you could really, all content, sort of standard

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content ethics really drops out, and all you'd be saying is, if Kant is right, is that everybody

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has to follow the Aristotelian program, because we have the Assetoric Imperative, everybody

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wants to do this, plus this is consistent, fulfills the universalizability maxim, so

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everyone's under an ethical obligation to do it so you could get

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kind of a content argument for Aristotelianism

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that way. You'd be adding to the Aristotelian program

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that not only is this the desirable way to live

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but it's obligatory. But as I say, this is just a

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speculative idea.

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Now, in Kant's view of ethics, he places a great deal of stress on the will, that is to say, the motive that you have in acting, much more than the results of what you act.

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He said the only thing that is entirely good in itself is the will to do good.

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So in, let's say, supposing in the Kantian, in Kant's view, supposing that I see somebody, say a friend of mine is very sick and I decide to help him out or take care of him

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I serve him because I'm very attached to this person, I'm distressed by his being sick and I want to help him.

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Have I done anything morally valuable?

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No, my actions don't have any moral merit.

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They would have moral merit only if I acted from duty,

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only if I said, well, I'm helping him because I ought to do so,

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This doesn't mean that I couldn't have affectionate feelings for my friend at the same time, but

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that can't be the reason I do it, if what I'm doing is to have moral merit.

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You see a very austere doctrine.

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You get moral merit for things only if you act from duty.

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Now we could, we might expect, and here we'd be surprised, that if someone holds this view,

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we might think that in politics they stress very much acting from the right motive.

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People need to act in an ethical way from the correct motive.

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But Kant doesn't take this position at all.

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Quite the contrary, he says that in politics, we're concerned only with external actions.

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We're not concerned with what the motives people have. Politics is purely an external

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matter. We're concerned, say, supposing I owe you some money, I have a legal obligation

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and to pay you back, the legal system is concerned only with, do I pay you the money? If I paid

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you the money just because I'm afraid I'll be arrested if I don't, if I didn't or sued

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if I didn't, then I wouldn't be acting from an ethical motive in the Kantian way. I wouldn't

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be acting because I ought to pay you back the money, but still that suffices from the

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from the standpoint of the state, all that counts is external action.

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So this is, remember I mentioned this in the lecture on Aquinas, Aquinas holds a similar

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position and this is a basic idea in classical liberalism that the sphere of coercive action,

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The only case in which you can act coercively to someone involve violations of rights.

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You can't act to secure any other ethical goals.

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You can't, supposing you hold, say, that certain types of sexual conduct are immoral, then

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in the classical liberal view, you can't prevent people from doing that unless they're

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The Contian classical liberal idea is completely going against the view that's held, say, by some traditionalist conservatives who say there can't be a right to do wrong.

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Traditionalist conservatives say there can't be a right to do wrong, you can't have a right to do something that's ethically wrong.

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Well, in the Kantian view, classical liberal view, this would be a confused statement.

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And it can't, it's certainly true that it can't be right, it can't be ethically correct

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to do something that's wrong, but it certainly makes sense to say that someone has a sphere

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of action in which he's free to choose what to do, and it's wrong to coerce him within

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that sphere, and in that sphere of action he might choose to do something that's wrong.

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You say people should be free to have the religious beliefs they want, but that's perfectly consistent with saying that people might be ethically wrong to adopt certain religious beliefs.

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So, very important in this view that action, the state politics is concerned only with

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external action.

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Kant, in saying that politics is concerned with external action, didn't at all abandon

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is the basic point in his ethical theory where he's concerned with universalizability.

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He was still, he's still a key issue for him is what rules can be universalized.

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Just as in ethics he's saying we have to see what can the maximum of our action be adopted

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as a universal law.

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Here he said, in policy he said, can the laws we propose be universally applied, but he's

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not concerned with motives.

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Now in adopting this view of the importance of universalizability, can our legal proposed

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laws be universalized?

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Rothbard was very much influenced by Rousseau. He had an interpretation of Rousseau's general

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will that makes it much less collectivist than Rousseau's own view of it. When Rousseau

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said, remember, the general will, you imagine the whole community getting together and passing

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Laws. Everyone just votes a certain way and then we see the result is what everybody,

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the whole body has decided. Kant took that to mean that everyone, what each person should

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do is to ask what laws could universally apply. So he's taking it in a much more individualistic

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It isn't that everybody gets together and votes on measures that each person asks.

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We ask what can be consistently made universal.

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Kant mentioned when he discusses Rousseau, he said one thing he learned from Rousseau

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is that reading Rousseau, not just a social contract, but his novels and Emile's work

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on Education, in the novel Dealing with Education, he said we learn the value, he learned the

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value of common people, he said before that he was inclined to think that only intellectuals

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and philosophers himself really mattered, but after he read Rousseau he realized the

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value of everyone, so he certainly interpreted Rousseau in a rather way much more compatible

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with classical liberalism than I was inclined to suggest Rousseau himself held.

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So he interpreted Rousseau in a way that got the best out of him, I think.

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He also held that in taking this view on the importance of universalizability,

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He felt he was modifying Plato in a certain way. Remember, Plato in the Republic ruled by the guardians, by the philosophers.

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He thought that by talking about what can be universalized, where everybody would be acting according to universalizable maps,

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He was making everybody, in effect, philosopher kings.

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He's making the elitist view democratic.

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It applies to everyone because everyone is acting through reason

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and following these universal laws.

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Now, when Kant applied this idea of, remember,

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and politics were concerned with external action and we want laws that can be universalized.

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So in considering how he applied this to property, he comes up in the first part of Metaphysics

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and Morals with some quite libertarian views.

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He says first of all, he said, we asked, do human beings have the right to acquire property?

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And he says they obviously do because property, just physical objects that has, there's nothing

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in property that would, that property can't have, land can't have rights by itself that

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would prevent us from taking it over.

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So human beings clearly have the right to act, to benefit themselves and they can appropriate

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property.

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Unlike Locke, Kant doesn't have any, he says we can just acquire property by taking it

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into our possession.

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He doesn't have any elaborate treatment of provisos, we can't let things spoil.

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He just takes it as fairly obvious that we can, what we want to do is appropriate to

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convert parts of the whole surface of the globe to our own use and he thinks it's desirable

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that the whole surface of the globe be put to human use, so in his view there shouldn't

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be any areas left over that aren't property.

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Now a key point here is that this goes very much along with his notion that laws have

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to be universalizable.

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He says rights have to be what he calls, property rights, all rights include property rights,

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This is a concept that Leibniz, who was a great German philosopher, stressed very much, and Kant was influenced by Leibniz to a great extent, although he broke with a lot of his philosophy.

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What does impossibility mean? Well, ordinary possibility, I can ask, is something possible, like, is it possible that I'm giving a lecture now?

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Well, yes it is, since I actually am giving a lecture, therefore it's possible that I am.

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Now, is it possible, say, for any one of you to give a lecture, yes it is, say, you could

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imagine one of you coming up and giving the lecture instead of me, much preferable state

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of affairs to the present one.

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But suppose I say, is it possible that at the same time you and I are giving the only

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Lecture Now. No, this isn't possible. So, impossibility means two possibilities that can take place at the same time.

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So, from the fact that A is possible and B is possible, it doesn't follow that A and B are compossible.

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that has to be established on a case-by-case basis.

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It does follow, if A and B come possible,

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that A is possible and B is possible,

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but the influence doesn't go the other way.

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So Kant says it's a requirement of reason

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that all rights become possible.

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We can have to have all rights

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capable of being exercised at the same time.

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When he applies this to property, he gets some very interesting results.

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He says, well, let's imagine that a group of people take land in a certain area into their possession.

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So you have a number of people, each one is making a claim to a certain part of land.

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Now, he thinks it's very likely that people have disputes about the various land claims.

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One person will say, well, the proper principle of initial acquisition of land is such-and-such

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that you mix your labor with it.

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And somebody else will say, no, I think just saying that you want to have this part of

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land is enough.

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People have the same principle. You have all sorts of disputes. How far does your boundary go? Have you taken too much in your claim that it's unreasonable, that we should accept that you can own all that?

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we can imagine all sorts of disputes about this so Kant thinks that because

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we have these disputes there's no way people could figure out just by

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reasoning what's the proper principle of initial acquisition how can we resolve

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these we have to take the claims to property rights that people make in the

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State of Nature, state of affairs where there's no authority saying how these questions should be settled.

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Now take these claims as provisional. So people have property rights in the state of nature, but they're provisional because there are disputes about them.

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I say, I own this room, and then Lew Rockwell says, no, you don't own this room. So we have a dispute about that.

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So, if there is no legal authority, then my claims are provisional.

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Now, here's where I think Kant makes an interesting point.

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Remember, he thinks it's an imperative of reason that we have both property rights.

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We can't just say we don't want to have property rights.

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This would be not in the interest of human beings to do this.

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Remember, we all have this esoteric imperative, want to live happy lives, we won't be able

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The State is unable to do that unless we have property rights, but we want all the property to become possible, and we don't have that if we just have these provisional claims to rights, so Kant said, well, then we are under an imperative of reason to set up a state that will settle these questions and say what the boundaries of the rights are.

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In doing that, can't just set aside the provisional claim rights that people have.

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It has to just consider them all and kind of get them in a consistent form, try to solve

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the coordination problem, so in that way we would have a set of composable rights.

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So Kant says, really, from the notion of property rights, he thinks he can show that people

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are under an imperative to set up a state.

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I think, looking at his argument, his argument would have been better had he said people

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are under an imperative to set up certain, to resolve this dispute, say, by agreeing

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on some kind of common law code. I don't think he showed we have to have a state to do this, but you can see how this, at any rate, I think is a very interesting argument that he has.

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Besides his work on property rights in the first part of Metaphysics and Moral, he also made a contribution to classical liberalism in his short book, 1795, called Perpetual Peace.

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Here, he's extremely critical of war and colonialism. He doesn't like, he thinks these are very

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bad institutions. And he calls, he said, in order to avoid war, we should have a federation

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of the Various States of the Earth, where they would each agree not to engage in aggressive

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war, and he doesn't want, contrary to what's sometimes supposed, he doesn't want a world

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government.

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He thinks this would be tyrannical if you had a single state that was ruling the entire

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in the entire world.

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But what he wants is a federation of states that would agree not to engage in war.

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And he thinks that it's desirable that each of these states be a republic because he thinks

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that in a republic, in order to go to war, you would need the permission of the people

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in people that you couldn't then have the, say, a despot or a king just decide to go

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to war because he thought it was in someone's, his interests or the nation's interests.

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He thought if you needed popular consent for a war, then people would be unlikely to engage

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in war.

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This is the beginnings of what's called democratic peace theory.

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This doesn't, I don't think his work, this theory has worked out entirely in practice

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because the democratic states, the ones that have tended to be very warlike, if you look

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at American foreign policy, it's certainly not one of pure pacifism, but Kant may have

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have an answer to this because he could say what he believes in is not democracy, but

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he has sort of what he thinks the best system is a republican system, which you don't have

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direct rule by the people at all.

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It's just there's sort of a popular consent to going to war, but he doesn't favor democracy,

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so he's not really exactly saying this democratic peace theory.

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His criticism of democracy, incidentally, is that direct democracy is unusual.

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He says, well, if you have direct democracy, then it's supposed to be that all the people

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are ruling, but in fact, some of the people, namely the ones in the minority, are not ruling.

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So he thinks this is somehow a contradiction, that he's saying, well, you're supposed to

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have direct rule by everybody but in fact some people don't agree.

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I don't think this is a very good argument because in democracy you're not saying that

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you want unanimous consent, but at any rate that's the argument he does give that argument.

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Now I've mentioned two examples where I think Kant has made valuable contributions to classical

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liberalism, his defense of property and his advocacy of a peaceful foreign policy.

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But there is one area I think his views are quite a bit more questionable and here the

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critics of Kant I think have a point against him.

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He thought that resistance to the state is never justifiable, you can never illicitly

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overthrow the government, revolutions are always out.

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It's not clear, I find it a little unclear why he thought that, but that was his view.

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Here I think we can see a tendency in his thought, both John Dewey and George Santayana

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in their respective books on German philosophy pointed this out.

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They were rather better critics of Kant, I think, than Ayn Rand.

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They point out there's a tendency in Kant and other German thinkers to stress the inner

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very much.

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In ethics, Kant is concerned with the will, although he doesn't apply this to politics, but here the stress on the inner, talking about revolution, the stress on the inner returns, because he's thinking that even if the state does something that's very bad, you don't have to internally approve it, and if you don't, that's sufficient, you're not justified in taking action against the state

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that would be acting in an, to act illegally is, according to him, always wrong. I think if you're

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interested in looking at this issue further, Santayana's book called Egotism in German

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Philosophy is very much worth reading. It's much, he had a much better style than John Dewey,

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I won't mention Dewey's book, but I think Santayana's point is very much worth reading.

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Now, as I say, Kant said revolution is never justifiable.

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However, there's an odd consequence to this.

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Supposing some people don't agree with Kant and they wage a successful revolution,

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Revolution, then can you go to war against the revolutionary regime to restore the old

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system?

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Kant said, no, you can't, because then you'd be revolting against that government.

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So something like revolution is always bad, but if it succeeds, then you can't change

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that either.

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so and in fact Kant was very enthusiastically in favor of the French

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Revolution although he opposed some of the excesses such as the execution of

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the King in January 1793 but he was a very much a supporter of the French

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Revolution even though from his own theory he would have to say that the

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revolutionary shouldn't have done what they did but once they did it that was

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is all right. There's an interesting parallel, I think, with the views of a 20th century

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libertarian, some you may know, Robert Lefebvre. Lefebvre thought that he had standard views,

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say, that theft and aggression are wrong, but supposing someone steals something from

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say while you're not looking he just reaches into your pocket and takes your

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wallet away he had no right to do that but once he's done it you can't

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legitimately use force to take it away from him so it's somewhat Kantian view

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there that you see and then if you did use force and got it away from him then

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And he couldn't do anything about it. So I don't think it's a contradictory view, but

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it's at least paradoxical. So what I've tried to show so far is that, although there are

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points one can criticize in Kant, he's quite, much of what he says is quite compatible with

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classical liberalism. And when I turn, we turn now to the other person I want to talk

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about the Hegel, matters are a bit different. Hegel was definitely not a classical liberal.

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I want to read one of the people who was one of the most anti-Hegelian of all

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philosophies was Arthur Schopenhauer, a somewhat younger contemporary. Schopenhauer,

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when he was actually, Hegel was on his doctoral examining committee, got through the exam all right,

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but then he scheduled lectures at the same time as Hegel, was the most popular philosophy professor,

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no one came to Schopenhauer's lectures, so he had a grudge against Hegel ever afterwards,

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but he had a description of Hegelian philosophy I'd like to read. If some of you

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Hagel, installed from above by the powers that be, is the certified great philosopher,

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was a flat-headed, insipid, nauseating, illiterate charlatan who reached the pinnacle of audacity

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in scribbling together and dishing up the craziest mystifying nonsense.

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This nonsense has been noisily proclaimed as immortal wisdom by mercenary followers and

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readily accepted as such by all fools who thus join into as perfect a chorus of admiration

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as had ever been heard before. The extensive field of spiritual influence with which Hegel

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was furnished by those in power has enabled him to achieve the intellectual corruption

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of a Whole Generation.

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His enthusiasm for Hegel was rather contained.

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We'll see to what extent he was justified in his views on Hegel.

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Hegel lived from 1770 to 1830.

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He became a professor of philosophy at the University of Berlin, which had been established

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early in the 19th century. His main work on politics is called The Philosophy of Right,

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which came out in 1821. It was based on lectures he'd given on politics over many years. And

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He wrote other essays on politics. He had an early essay on the German Constitution in constitutional reform.

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His last essay, in fact, was a criticism of the English reform bill of 1832.

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I've always wondered how Hegel wrote this essay criticizing the English reform bill of 1832,

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as he died in 1831, actually the bill was in discussion quite a bit before it was passed,

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so that was what he was writing about.

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The basic principle, Hegel in the philosophy of right, I should say before I go into the

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I'll just say a few words about Hegel's general philosophy, which is extremely difficult to understand.

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The real point of Hegel's philosophy, I think we can grasp, perhaps, if you recall something I said when I was talking about Aristotle.

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Remember, Aristotle thought that substances have natures, and everything has certain essential properties, the properties that make it what it is.

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And some substances don't fully achieve their essence immediately.

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Say, an oak tree starts off as a seed, and then there's, in the Aristotelian view, there's

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a process of growth that's guided by its end, by what its end, in fact, the full development

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of its nature, and this guides its growth until it achieves its full nature.

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So what Hegel really did was say this view applies to the entire universe.

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We should take the entire universe as a single substance that has, whose nature is to be

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completely rational.

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So the entire world would become really the absolute mind or God.

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I'm not going to go into whether we should say this process takes place in time or not.

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That's a very controverted issue, but what we see is that Hegel thought there was a process

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by which mind or spirit is constantly becoming more and more realized in history.

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So, imagine the world is a gigantic syllogism. It's reason-enacted. Now, what Hegel was trying

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to do in his basic, even his political philosophy, was this. He said that a problem that people

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have, remember, here's another philosopher who was influenced by Rousseau. Remember when

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I was talking about Rousseau on the Discourse on Inequality and Discourse on Arts and Sciences

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where he criticized the division of labor. He said people were alienated from the world.

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They think that they don't fully contain lives by themselves. They're in opposition to other

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and other people that are dependent on others, so they don't have, they're not happy anymore.

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What Hegel wanted to do was, he felt that in his political philosophy, in philosophy

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of history, he wanted to show, the main theme is reconciliation, he wanted to show how we

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could view the world in a certain way, or even if bad things happen, we can see these

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He says rationally required so we can be reconciled to them in his famous sentence in his philosophy,

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so-called double sentence, what is rational is actual and what is actual is rational.

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So he's saying reason is not some abstraction apart from the world, we know it's present

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in the World, and also what is in the world is reasonable.

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We don't, it's not fully evident how it's reasonable right away, but this is coming about

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more and more.

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We'll see, Hegel thinks, as history goes on, we see how the world is becoming more and

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more reasonable.

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And Hegel says in the foreword to the philosophy of right, he says that it's foolish for a

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philosopher to try to come up with some ideal system that people should do.

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He said philosophy is its own time comprehended in thought, so what he's going to do is not

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come up with some kind of revolutionary scheme that will overthrow things that he wants to

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to explain why the existing state of history is the one that reason requires.

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So people, if they accept this, will be reconciled to the world.

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Now, in carrying out this program, he follows this famous dialectical method.

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This is where he gets his part that's hard to understand.

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What he does throughout his work, he'll start with a certain category, and then he'll show, or claim to show, there's something incomplete about that category, so it will somehow go into its opposite.

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not necessarily the logical contradictory, but somehow there'll be another side of the new concept will be something opposed to the first concept.

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And then there's another stage where there's a union of these first two stages and then somehow this higher concept really takes both the previous ones into account while modifying them.

407
00:53:21.900 --> 00:53:30.900
Sometimes people refer to the Hegelian Triad. You've sometimes heard this. People say thesis, antithesis, and synthesis.

408
00:53:30.900 --> 00:53:44.900
Hegel really doesn't use those terms very much. That's more to be found in Fichte, a somewhat earlier German thinker coming between Kant and Hegel.

409
00:53:44.900 --> 00:53:54.400
But Hegel certainly has this concept, regardless of this way of doing things, regardless of whether he uses a term or not.

410
00:53:54.400 --> 00:54:06.700
So, in political philosophy, what Hegel does, and this is where he gets into the reasoning to his anti-classical liberalist position,

411
00:54:06.700 --> 00:54:13.180
And why I think one's justified calling him an enemy of liberty is that he starts off

412
00:54:13.180 --> 00:54:20.940
with a certain concept that seemed quite compatible in many respects with classical liberalism,

413
00:54:20.940 --> 00:54:28.140
but then they're overcome by the contrary, by the next concept, and Hegel claims that

414
00:54:28.140 --> 00:54:34.020
the truth in the early concept has been taken up in the higher concept, but in fact it's

415
00:54:34.020 --> 00:54:35.020
really cancelled.

416
00:54:35.020 --> 00:54:54.020
I should say one other thing I should have mentioned. When you get the new concept, I said you have the first concept, then there's the contradictory one, the opposing one, I should say, then there's the synthesizing concept, then you start the triad again.

417
00:54:54.020 --> 00:55:02.580
Hagel calls this one where the old synthesizing concept becomes the new start, the new try,

418
00:55:02.580 --> 00:55:10.140
calls this a collapse into immediacy because we're looking at the concept and the first

419
00:55:10.140 --> 00:55:15.300
time is combining two concepts, now you're viewing it as kind of a single concept, there's

420
00:55:15.300 --> 00:55:18.180
going to be a new opposition to that.

421
00:55:18.180 --> 00:55:31.940
Now I must say I find this somewhat incomprehensible. I think for once the fault is not in my exposition

422
00:55:31.940 --> 00:55:40.660
of it but with the actual philosophy itself. But now to get now to what Hegel does in philosophy

423
00:55:40.660 --> 00:55:52.660
The work is in three sections. The first one is called abstract right. This is the one that's compatible with classical liberalism.

424
00:55:52.660 --> 00:56:01.540
Here, Hegel says, he's asking, remember the theme is philosophy, how does reason or spirit,

425
00:56:01.540 --> 00:56:08.980
geist, manifest itself in the world? Well, he says, it's reasonable to take spirit first

426
00:56:08.980 --> 00:56:19.020
as manifest itself in individual human beings. So, if you have, say, an individual person,

427
00:56:19.020 --> 00:56:32.500
One way the person can try to make the world rational is to impose his will on the outside

428
00:56:32.500 --> 00:56:33.500
world.

429
00:56:33.500 --> 00:56:43.260
So if you have, say, I'm a human being, I have a mind, so by imposing my will on lifeless

430
00:56:43.260 --> 00:56:57.260
In this matter, I'm an instance of the growth of reason in the world, and how do I do this, according to Hegel, is by appropriating property to myself.

431
00:56:57.260 --> 00:57:09.260
So, Hegel says, property has to, what he says, you have, the individual is, can seize property, just takes over land, and it becomes his.

432
00:57:09.260 --> 00:57:39.260
So, Hegel is in favor of property rights and he says at the same time that one can't seize other people if you seize someone else, try to appropriate him and claim him as your property, that would be illegitimate because to exercise your reason properly, you must exercise your reason on something that doesn't have reason, on an inaction

433
00:57:39.260 --> 00:57:57.260
and because of this, he says slavery is never justifiable. He criticizes the ancient Greeks, who were usually very fond of allowing slavery. He says this is never justifiable.

434
00:57:57.260 --> 00:58:09.260
Now, so far he sounds pretty good. Now, he goes on from there to, say, talk about contracts in a fairly standard way.

435
00:58:09.260 --> 00:58:19.960
He says that if people value own property, then they can have exchanges, and he describes various kinds of contracts.

436
00:58:19.960 --> 00:58:35.960
Then he said, well, what happens if people don't observe the contract, probably violate the contract, then we can have a justifiable punishment of people for violating the contract.

437
00:58:35.960 --> 00:58:43.960
And here is where he starts to get into some of the material that's a bit very questionable.

438
00:58:43.960 --> 00:58:51.480
He says we could distinguish what kind of violations can we have, we can distinguish

439
00:58:51.480 --> 00:59:02.760
ones where people really want to observe the law properly, don't want to violate anybody's

440
00:59:02.760 --> 00:59:07.240
ethical obligations, but they just make a mistake about things.

441
00:59:07.240 --> 00:59:33.240
I suppose I think that you claim I owe you some money, and I think I really don't, I've just made a mistake, I do so I don't pay you, so then you consume me for the money, but I haven't, I'm not ethically at fault unless I was very negligent in thinking that I didn't owe you the money, because I just made a mistake.

442
00:59:33.240 --> 00:59:49.240
Then he said, well, we can take cases of fraud where I'm deliberately doing something against the contract, but I'm not repudiating the whole notion of law altogether.

443
00:59:49.240 --> 01:00:02.240
And then he thinks of more severe crimes where, say, if I use violence against you, then I'd be saying, in effect, that there shouldn't be a system of laws at all.

444
01:00:02.240 --> 01:00:11.240
So, there, he said, this is typical, typically, he says, this is something like an infinite negative judgment.

445
01:00:11.240 --> 01:00:16.240
He says it's like, S is not P, infinitely negative.

446
01:00:16.240 --> 01:00:21.240
What that's supposed to mean, I couldn't really say, but that's what he says.

447
01:00:21.240 --> 01:00:29.240
So now, what happens if someone acts in this very bad way?

448
01:00:29.240 --> 01:00:37.120
Then Hegel says he can be punished, and here he claims that by punishing the person who

449
01:00:37.120 --> 01:00:48.440
committed a crime in this sense, you're annulling what he's done. Supposing, say, it's very

450
01:00:48.440 --> 01:00:58.440
hard to see why Hegel thinks this. Supposing, say, I can't resist the temptation to hit

451
01:00:58.440 --> 01:01:03.440
somebody over the head and take money from him. I do that and then I'm sent to prison

452
01:01:03.440 --> 01:01:11.720
for a long time. Then this is certainly bad for me, but it's not clear how that annuls

453
01:01:11.720 --> 01:01:20.400
what the crime, but Hegel thinks that it does, that somehow the punishment renders what the

454
01:01:20.400 --> 01:01:27.360
criminal has done a nullity. It makes it as if it had never happened. I think much more

455
01:01:27.360 --> 01:01:44.360
If we look at Aristotle's view when he talks about corrective justice, because what Aristotle says is when someone has violated someone's rights, when it's done something wrong, what you're supposed to do is restore the previous situation.

456
01:01:44.360 --> 01:02:11.360
If, say, I stole money from you, then I have to give it back to you, so we get to the previous situation, but it isn't that in giving you back the money, I've annulled what I've done, it's just that it's your money, so a just situation is one that restores what it was before, but that isn't the way Hegel views it.

457
01:02:11.360 --> 01:02:17.720
and he goes further he says that the criminal himself should accept this he

458
01:02:17.720 --> 01:02:25.940
should take into his own mind his own will that he should be punished so that

459
01:02:25.940 --> 01:02:34.940
he can annul what he's done. Now this leads us to the second section of

460
01:02:34.940 --> 01:02:38.940
and Philosophy of Right, which deals with personal morality.

461
01:02:38.940 --> 01:02:46.940
And here, what Hegel is really doing is making a criticism of Kant's approach to ethics.

462
01:02:46.940 --> 01:02:59.940
Remember, Kant, as I mentioned, stresses the inner will, how it's not enough to act morally correctly to do the right thing.

463
01:02:59.940 --> 01:03:05.540
You have to act from the intention of doing your duty.

464
01:03:05.540 --> 01:03:15.840
Hegel agrees that people have to have the intention of doing their duty, but he says

465
01:03:15.840 --> 01:03:25.140
this is too abstract a notion, because if you just say, I have to do my duty, it doesn't

466
01:03:25.140 --> 01:03:27.340
have any content to it.

467
01:03:27.340 --> 01:03:35.340
What am I supposed to do? I'm supposed to say I'm supposed to do my duty, but I don't know what that is.

468
01:03:35.340 --> 01:03:40.340
There has to be someone, there has to be some way of saying what it is I'm supposed to do.

469
01:03:40.340 --> 01:03:46.340
It isn't enough just to act according to pure will.

470
01:03:46.340 --> 01:04:15.340
He says something like, I think in this section, the laurels of pure willing are barren leaves

471
01:04:15.340 --> 01:04:26.520
that are never green. Pure willing doesn't achieve anything. It's just an empty abstraction.

472
01:04:26.520 --> 01:04:34.540
He opposes what he calls morality for morality's sake. There always has to be some specified

473
01:04:34.540 --> 01:04:41.140
content and it isn't enough for the specified content just to be something like a general

474
01:04:41.140 --> 01:04:50.700
Max, and like Love Your Neighbors, Yourself, or anything of that kind, you have to have

475
01:04:50.700 --> 01:04:57.820
specific content telling you what to do, and pure abstraction doesn't do this.

476
01:04:57.820 --> 01:05:05.020
Now we get into, I think, one of the real areas where I think what Schopenhauer said

477
01:05:05.020 --> 01:05:10.340
was justifiable, where Hegel gets really dangerous.

478
01:05:10.340 --> 01:05:27.340
He said, one form of this stress on pure willing, which is, remember it's a stage that one goes through in getting to the growth of reason,

479
01:05:27.340 --> 01:05:35.340
but it's one that he has a lot of criticism, is people will say they have to act according to conscience.

480
01:05:35.340 --> 01:06:04.340
Suppose you think, imagine say, you get a, you're drafted into a war you consider unjust and you say, I can't obey that order because it would go against my conscience to do so, or you say, I think that I'm not going to follow, say, certain racially restrictive laws in the South.

481
01:06:05.340 --> 01:06:12.300
in the South during the 1950s, because my conscience tells me these are bad laws, I'm

482
01:06:12.300 --> 01:06:20.500
not going to do this. So, Hegel says, this is, if you say you should follow your conscience,

483
01:06:20.500 --> 01:06:26.740
this is evil, you shouldn't follow what your conscience said, because if you do that, you're

484
01:06:26.740 --> 01:06:35.180
You're just saying that morality is what I arbitrarily decide to be right, it's just

485
01:06:35.180 --> 01:06:39.380
I think something is wrong, therefore I shouldn't do it.

486
01:06:39.380 --> 01:06:44.260
And what happens if people adopt that attitude?

487
01:06:44.260 --> 01:06:50.780
Then he says this is the identical attitude to the worst evildoer, because the worst evildoer

488
01:06:50.780 --> 01:07:13.780
will say, I don't care what the conventions say, I'm going to do this. I don't care, say that, according to morality, I'm not supposed to murder anybody if I think, say, the Jews in Germany should all be got rid of, I'm going to do that.

489
01:07:13.780 --> 01:07:22.820
So the evildoer would be saying, I'm going to act as my will dictates, and Hegel says,

490
01:07:22.820 --> 01:07:30.420
this is exactly what following your own conscience amounts to. You're saying you're doing what

491
01:07:32.740 --> 01:07:41.620
you think is right. So Hegel comes up with the repellent view that you ought not to follow

492
01:07:41.620 --> 01:07:46.620
and how to control your conscience if it goes against customary morality.

493
01:07:46.620 --> 01:08:00.620
Customary morality, not by coincidence, is the next section, the final section of the philosophy of right.

494
01:08:00.620 --> 01:08:08.620
The German term that Hegel used, customary morality, is very important in his philosophy.

495
01:08:13.620 --> 01:08:24.620
Zitlichkeit kind of means sort of a, oh I did it again, I always do that, it's customary.

496
01:08:24.620 --> 01:08:30.620
All right, so it's that sort of a customary institutionalized form of morality.

497
01:08:30.620 --> 01:08:37.620
We have certain, in a society, we have certain institutions that tell us what is the right thing to do.

498
01:08:37.620 --> 01:08:44.620
Hegel thinks that this is an ethical substance that really exists.

499
01:08:44.620 --> 01:08:53.620
It's not just an abstraction. It's not just, say, there's certain customs and institutions.

500
01:08:53.620 --> 01:09:03.620
These are all unified, and so they form a substance, and people in following custom are sometimes unconscious,

501
01:09:03.620 --> 01:09:11.620
very often unconscious of why the customs are in effect,

502
01:09:11.620 --> 01:09:19.620
and he cites Antigone's statement that no one knows where the eternal laws come from,

503
01:09:19.620 --> 01:09:31.620
But he thinks certain classes of people, probably philosophers such as himself, were able to bring to consciousness what the ethical substance is.

504
01:09:31.620 --> 01:09:45.620
So in developing his view of the ethical substance, he again, as you would expect from Hegel, he goes into a triad.

505
01:09:45.620 --> 01:09:53.820
And he starts off with the family and he holds, again, what he's talking about is ethical

506
01:09:53.820 --> 01:09:54.820
substance.

507
01:09:54.820 --> 01:10:02.060
It's sort of an institution that really exists apart, that is not just composed of the individual,

508
01:10:02.060 --> 01:10:10.400
say the husband and wife, or not just two separate individuals, that would be going

509
01:10:10.400 --> 01:10:14.980
back to abstract, right, the first stage we've already gotten through this.

510
01:10:14.980 --> 01:10:22.260
So he says the husband and wife should be viewed as one person, they're one entity,

511
01:10:22.260 --> 01:10:26.260
and the husband is the ruling entity.

512
01:10:26.260 --> 01:10:34.360
In fact, he had a very low opinion of women's intelligence, and if, when he met, say, intellectual

513
01:10:34.360 --> 01:10:40.120
women who would ask him questions about his philosophy, he would just switch the conversation

514
01:10:40.120 --> 01:10:44.120
to something else or just brush them off.

515
01:10:44.120 --> 01:10:55.720
So also he thought it's desirable because the family is an institution guiding individuals

516
01:10:55.720 --> 01:10:56.720
what to do.

517
01:10:56.720 --> 01:11:03.680
It's desirable that individuals not get married by their own choice but that parents arrange

518
01:11:03.680 --> 01:11:06.680
people's marriages.

519
01:11:06.680 --> 01:11:14.040
Children naturally should be very strictly disciplined and not allowed to exercise in

520
01:11:14.040 --> 01:11:32.360
The second part of this stage, we're in the third part of the philosophy of right, the

521
01:11:32.360 --> 01:11:37.760
one on customary morality, we're gone from the family, now we're into the next stage,

522
01:11:37.760 --> 01:11:39.680
which is civil society.

523
01:11:39.680 --> 01:11:47.640
Here, Hegel has some things to say that aren't so bad.

524
01:11:47.640 --> 01:11:54.680
He's very much aware of the need for a division of labor and the market, and he realizes that

525
01:11:54.680 --> 01:12:01.720
institutions can develop just on the market without requiring governmental control.

526
01:12:01.720 --> 01:12:09.120
He favors individual property rights, he says, and he also says the law shouldn't discriminate

527
01:12:09.120 --> 01:12:17.120
among people on the basis of religion. He said we shouldn't say something like, somebody's

528
01:12:17.120 --> 01:12:23.600
a German or a Frenchman or a Jew, we should have everyone, the law applies to everyone

529
01:12:23.600 --> 01:12:32.560
in the same way. So he does though, although he studied English and Scottish political

530
01:12:32.560 --> 01:12:33.560
and Financial Economy.

531
01:12:33.560 --> 01:12:43.440
He doesn't think that the market really will work in the way that the British economists

532
01:12:43.440 --> 01:12:44.440
thought.

533
01:12:44.440 --> 01:12:47.160
He had a sort of a pre-Keynesian view.

534
01:12:47.160 --> 01:12:54.400
He thought that, actually a pre-Marxist view also, that the market would generate, if it

535
01:12:54.400 --> 01:13:01.160
left to itself, a poor class of people, he calls this the rabble, who will not be able

536
01:13:01.160 --> 01:13:11.640
to earn a living just on the pure free market. So some Marxists viewed Hegel as a precursor

537
01:13:11.640 --> 01:13:20.040
to Marx in this respect in saying that the capitalism will lead to the class of people,

538
01:13:20.040 --> 01:13:28.800
the proletariat, increasingly getting worse off. There's a book, a short book, by a French

539
01:13:28.800 --> 01:13:37.800
in translation to English, Eric Weil, called Hegel in the State.

540
01:13:37.800 --> 01:13:42.800
Notice, I didn't cover up what I wrote this time.

541
01:13:42.800 --> 01:13:52.800
So, Hegel then allows, as you say, has some, gives some place for the market,

542
01:13:52.800 --> 01:13:56.800
although it's a subordinate place and one the government can rule.

543
01:13:56.800 --> 01:14:03.280
Now we get to the key part, the third part on the state.

544
01:14:03.280 --> 01:14:09.440
This is, remember, we're still in the section on customary morality.

545
01:14:09.440 --> 01:14:18.800
Now, he says that the state is the divine idea on earth.

546
01:14:18.800 --> 01:14:22.480
The state is the march of God on the earth.

547
01:14:22.480 --> 01:14:34.480
So, really, in the state, really, we have the highest development of rationality before we get to the next stage of Hegel's system,

548
01:14:34.480 --> 01:14:42.480
which I'm not going to be talking about today, our religion and philosophy, but so far, the state is the highest growth of rationality,

549
01:14:42.480 --> 01:14:47.480
so people have to be completely subordinate to the state.

550
01:14:47.480 --> 01:14:54.080
So remember, I mentioned before, he said people have individual rights and property rights.

551
01:14:54.080 --> 01:15:06.440
It sounded all right, but he thinks if necessary, the state can overrule these because the state

552
01:15:06.440 --> 01:15:11.800
is the incarnation of reason, and it's higher than individuals.

553
01:15:11.800 --> 01:15:16.320
If an individual were to say, I'm not going to do what the state says, then he would be

554
01:15:16.320 --> 01:15:23.640
going back to the mistake of following his own conscience, and he would be an evil person.

555
01:15:23.640 --> 01:15:31.800
He ought to go along with the customary morality and do what the state orders.

556
01:15:31.800 --> 01:15:39.600
When Hegel talks about the state, he doesn't mean a world state.

557
01:15:39.600 --> 01:15:46.000
He thinks there are particular states, separate states, and it's necessary that a state,

558
01:15:46.000 --> 01:15:51.440
for a state to exist, that it be in opposition to other states.

559
01:15:51.440 --> 01:15:59.960
This defines it as an entity that faces other states, including possible enemies.

560
01:15:59.960 --> 01:16:08.600
And going along with this, Hegel thinks that war is very often desirable, at least sometimes

561
01:16:08.600 --> 01:16:24.600
because this helps people become less corrupt. When there's a war going on, people will be unified and be willing to sacrifice to protect the state.

562
01:16:24.600 --> 01:16:42.600
and these ethical, ethical motives become dominant where in peacetime people become too much concerned with luxury and just living for themselves and so wars are from time to time necessary.

563
01:16:42.600 --> 01:16:54.600
And he refers to one phrase to hussars as a type of knight. Hussars and shining sabers. He rather likes war.

564
01:16:54.600 --> 01:17:11.600
Now, what kind of state does Hegel think is the best kind? He thinks that a monarchy is by far the best kind of state.

565
01:17:11.600 --> 01:17:19.880
because in a monarchy, a monarchy expresses fully, more fully than other

566
01:17:19.880 --> 01:17:27.800
types of states, the unity of reason. He thinks, supposing, say, I'm trying to

567
01:17:27.800 --> 01:17:32.600
decide something, I have some important decision to make, and there are all

568
01:17:32.600 --> 01:17:38.000
sorts of considerations on one side or the other, so I'm weighing up all the

569
01:17:38.000 --> 01:17:44.120
and the pros and cons of something, deciding what to do, then there's a moment of unity

570
01:17:44.120 --> 01:17:48.800
where I have to say, well, these are the one side, this is the other, now I've made my

571
01:17:48.800 --> 01:17:56.680
decision, this is it. There's a sort of an act, a single act of will being the final decision.

572
01:17:56.680 --> 01:18:06.480
So Hegel thinks this, the monarch is, represents this in the state, the monarch is a single

573
01:18:06.480 --> 01:18:16.480
The person who's enacted all laws into being, the decision comes through him.

574
01:18:16.480 --> 01:18:24.480
So if you didn't have a monarch, reason wouldn't be fully in effect.

575
01:18:24.480 --> 01:18:29.480
You wouldn't have this parallel with human reason, in the way I've explained.

576
01:18:29.480 --> 01:18:34.480
But this doesn't mean the monarch is absolute or can do anything he wants.

577
01:18:34.480 --> 01:18:49.480
Quite the contrary, the monarch is constitutional, and all he really does is ratify what the other parts of the government have done.

578
01:18:49.480 --> 01:18:55.480
His key role is just, he is the focus of unity for the whole state.

579
01:18:55.480 --> 01:19:11.480
Hegel thought there should be a legislature, but this would not, a bicameral legislature, two houses, but this would not be one where people would vote, as we do, for representatives.

580
01:19:11.480 --> 01:19:27.480
But there would be, there were estates, such as the agricultural estate, there were other estates in the kingdom,

581
01:19:27.480 --> 01:19:35.480
meaning the sort of classes of people that were worthy of representation, and these would be represented separately.

582
01:19:35.480 --> 01:19:50.480
So you wouldn't have people voting for particular people, there would just be certain groups like groups of businessmen or groups of farmers and these would have representation.

583
01:19:50.480 --> 01:20:00.480
It's very much along the lines of what was later put into effect in the Italian fascist government corporatism.

584
01:20:00.480 --> 01:20:10.480
In fact, the foremost philosopher of Italian fascism, Giovanni Gentile, was a very ardent Hegelian.

585
01:20:10.480 --> 01:20:19.480
So he got some of the ideas for what he wanted from Hegel on this point, so we have a corporate representation.

586
01:20:19.480 --> 01:20:29.480
There's also, and this is one of the most important things Hegel said, there's a bureaucratic class that Hegel placed a great deal of stress on

587
01:20:29.480 --> 01:20:35.480
government administrators who would be, bureaucracy would be impartial and be

588
01:20:38.040 --> 01:20:45.480
enact reason by being impartial. This would be much more, it would be much more important than

589
01:20:46.120 --> 01:20:53.480
the people because although Hegel thought the government should be aware of public opinion,

590
01:20:53.480 --> 01:20:58.480
It should also, if necessary, treat public opinion with contempt.

591
01:20:58.480 --> 01:21:06.480
Now, in the last section, last chapter of Philosophy of the Right,

592
01:21:06.480 --> 01:21:19.480
Hegel is on the development of history, and Hegel now says it's not only do we have particular states that exist at a time,

593
01:21:19.480 --> 01:21:32.480
At each time in history, one state will be the most important, the reason will be present in one state rather than another.

594
01:21:32.480 --> 01:21:44.480
He has a whole scheme of things where you start off with the Orient where only one man, mainly the ruler, is free, everyone else isn't free.

595
01:21:44.480 --> 01:21:49.680
and you have a development of freedom, at least, freedom in his sense, going throughout history.

596
01:21:49.680 --> 01:21:56.720
There's a Greek stage in which you have independent sources of consciousness.

597
01:21:56.720 --> 01:22:02.320
And it's interesting, in his treatment of the Greeks, he placed a great deal of stress

598
01:22:02.320 --> 01:22:09.120
on that the Greek cities were guided by oracles in making important decisions.

599
01:22:09.120 --> 01:22:11.920
This is extremely important for some reason.

600
01:22:11.920 --> 01:22:36.680
And then he goes on, he describes the Roman world, and he thinks here there is a separation between individuals and what the state is doing, so individuals just think of what they should do in an inner way, they don't carry out their views of what's ethically proper into action.

601
01:22:36.680 --> 01:22:44.120
discusses the Stoics here and then the highest stage so far is the Germanic

602
01:22:44.120 --> 01:22:51.680
world. By the Germanic world he means not just Germany but all of Western Europe and

603
01:22:51.680 --> 01:22:57.880
he thinks this is where reason has ended, the highest stage of reason so far. I'll

604
01:22:57.880 --> 01:23:07.760
I'll just end with one story that involves this point on the Germanic world.

605
01:23:07.760 --> 01:23:15.040
There was a proposal one time, I think in the 1950s, that Karl Popper, who was a very

606
01:23:15.040 --> 01:23:22.720
strong opponent of Hegel, should be appointed to a chair at the University of Chicago.

607
01:23:22.720 --> 01:23:30.000
So Leo Strauss, who was a professor, was very, very much opposed to this, and he wrote to

608
01:23:30.000 --> 01:23:38.320
Eric Vogelin, who was another very famous historian of philosophy. He said, can you

609
01:23:38.320 --> 01:23:48.360
tell me what's your opinion of Karl Popper? Popper, I mean, Vogelin wrote back, he said,

610
01:23:48.360 --> 01:24:11.560
The Germanic world, Hegel means Germany, can you imagine anything like that?

611
01:24:11.560 --> 01:24:17.800
So then Strauss replies to him, thanks very much for your letter, you've done a tremendous

612
01:24:17.800 --> 01:24:31.800
Good. Now we've been able to get rid of pauper. So I just thought that would be an appropriate story to finish the lecture. So all right, we'll now have any, we have a little time for questions. Rodney.

613
01:24:47.800 --> 01:25:17.400
The question was, some people have suggested that there is an aspect of Hegel that could be taken in a libertarian way,

614
01:25:17.400 --> 01:25:47.400
specifically in the phenomenology in the famous section on the dialectic of master and slave, where it's, although the master is first dominant, then the slave is really, gets the upper hand because the master is parasitic on him, and then the consciousness really develops through the slave, not the master, so I think it's right that one could, and Hayek goes on to say how,

615
01:25:47.400 --> 01:25:54.680
We get the notion of mutual recognition here. I think it's right that one could see this in a

616
01:25:55.640 --> 01:26:02.600
take, get a libertarian view of this, but that's not what Hegel did with it. He developed, he

617
01:26:04.120 --> 01:26:10.360
didn't say, well, okay, now we're, well, he did say we shouldn't have, he definitely did say,

618
01:26:10.360 --> 01:26:15.720
and I mentioned we shouldn't have slavery and we should all have individual rights, but then this

619
01:26:15.720 --> 01:26:34.720
We can get that to that stage. If we stop there, then that's perfectly fine. But then remember, Hayek wanted to go further, and then these individuals are transcended by the state, you know, they have to be subordinate to the state.

620
01:26:34.720 --> 01:26:41.480
So I think you're right that you could get to libertarian inclusion if, say, you just

621
01:26:41.480 --> 01:26:46.760
toss out parts two and three of philosophy of right, stay with the section on abstract

622
01:26:46.760 --> 01:26:47.760
right.

623
01:26:47.760 --> 01:26:48.760
That would be a good thing, too.

624
01:26:48.760 --> 01:26:57.320
I should mention also, of course, the great book on this is by Kougev, Alexandre Kougev,

625
01:26:57.320 --> 01:27:03.240
on Introduction to the Reading of Hegel.

626
01:27:03.240 --> 01:27:08.240
He was the one who really stressed that section of phenomenology.

627
01:27:08.240 --> 01:27:09.240
Matthew.

628
01:27:09.240 --> 01:27:10.240
I probably don't have the same expertise or cable that you need to do that for me.

629
01:27:10.240 --> 01:27:11.240
I brought in some cable.

630
01:27:11.240 --> 01:27:12.240
You kind of mentioned that he had like, I know there's a book called Philosophy of History,

631
01:27:12.240 --> 01:27:13.240
but we might cover the same themes in another place.

632
01:27:13.240 --> 01:27:14.240
But in any event, you kind of pointed out that his idea of the evolution of reason was that,

633
01:27:14.240 --> 01:27:28.420
okay, in the oriental world, the

634
01:27:58.420 --> 01:28:28.180
The question was, I mentioned in my talk something about Hegel's philosophy of history where there's

635
01:28:28.180 --> 01:28:37.180
and his development of reason from starting with the Orient going to the Western Europe as it existed in his time.

636
01:28:37.180 --> 01:28:48.180
And he points out that Hegel said that Africa is a completely dark continent. There's no reason at all there.

637
01:28:48.180 --> 01:28:58.180
And what is the consequence for Hegel's philosophy in considering Africa in that way?

638
01:28:58.180 --> 01:29:17.180
Well, I think if Hegel had been, of course remember at that time, Hegel was very dependent on what the historical material available to him was.

639
01:29:17.180 --> 01:29:22.980
So, he wasn't claiming, he was just dealing with what he had to go on.

640
01:29:22.980 --> 01:29:34.260
I think if he'd known more, if it wasn't people started studying African civilization

641
01:29:34.260 --> 01:29:41.140
or American civilizations, say, the Incas and Mayas in Central and South America more,

642
01:29:41.140 --> 01:29:46.380
then I think you wouldn't be able to take such a linear view of things, just say, this

643
01:29:46.380 --> 01:29:53.260
This is all that reason is you have to have a more pluralistic view and I think philosophies

644
01:29:53.260 --> 01:30:01.140
of history you had more material to work on such as Oswald Spengler did have a more pluralistic

645
01:30:01.140 --> 01:30:06.580
conception although Spengler didn't say anything about Africa either but I mean I think you

646
01:30:06.580 --> 01:30:12.260
know you could extend that and bring more you would just not be able to have such a

647
01:30:12.260 --> 01:30:13.260
view.

648
01:30:13.260 --> 01:30:18.740
It's interesting you mention that because Eric Vogel, remember the one I had, the funny

649
01:30:18.740 --> 01:30:26.660
letter on Hegel, in his philosophy of history, he had to develop it. He thought that he'd

650
01:30:26.660 --> 01:30:32.820
started off with kind of a linear system in his great work order in history, which he

651
01:30:32.820 --> 01:30:37.820
planned to have in six volumes. He found he couldn't carry it out when he learned more

652
01:30:37.820 --> 01:30:47.220
or about other civilizations. In volume four, and he changed his organization plan, in volume

653
01:30:47.220 --> 01:30:52.820
four, called the Ecumenical Age of Vogel and System, he has a non-linear system. We have

654
01:30:52.820 --> 01:30:58.100
all sorts of different civilizations going on at the same time. Well, I think we're out

655
01:30:58.100 --> 01:30:59.740
of time now, so thanks very much.